Dancing to Death's Drum
by Tarafina
Summary: She feels like she's dancing on a perilous edge.


**Title**: Dancing to Death's Drum  
**Category**: Smallville/The Vampire Diaries  
**Genre**: Angst/Romance  
**Ship**: Chloe/Damon  
**Rating**: PG13  
**Prompt**: #01 - Life  
**Word Count**: 925  
**Summary**: She feels like she's dancing on a perilous edge.

**_Dancing to Death's Drum  
_**-Drabble-

She feels like she's dancing on a perilous edge. One wrong move, wrong word, and he could snap her pretty little neck like it was nothing. She should leave him in the dust, walk away. He'd let her go; if only because he grew a grudging respect for her. But then he's there, staring at her with those cool blue eyes, a smirk twitching the corners of his mouth, and she's sure he knows exactly what she's thinking.

The problem with being this close to death is that it makes her feel alive. Her entire existence has been her trying her best to live and now she wonders if she might be trying to die. She's died before, though she doesn't remember what it brings. Peace? Solitude? Nothing? All she knows is that she's traded her life in lieu of somebody else's, a few times even, and the Fates deemed her important enough to bring back. Or, well, whoever it was that made meteor rocks. She couldn't really thank a planet for that and perhaps there was no grand cosmos behind it. Regardless, it was gone now. There were no liquid green fingers of rejuvenation out to bring her back. Instead, she's left with reality. That this man, this _vampire_, could tire of her, could end her as easily as taking a breath.

Each time he runs those cold hands down her body, she reacts, shivers, and her heart pumps rapidly not only in attraction but a sense of fear, of knowledge that this could be her last breath, her last touch. He knows this. Uses it to his advantage, even. Trails those fingers of his all along her flesh, smirking as she leans into his touch while simultaneously she's inwardly revolting against it.

_Run_, her mind tells her.

_Stay_, her body urges.

_Feel_, her heart encourages.

So she lays back, eyes half-closed, watching beneath dark lashes as he kisses her stomach, as incisors too long for any regular human being, graze and tickle her navel. He explores her hips, thumbs stroking, and his mouth draws a slow, teasing path up her body. He settles between her legs firmly, comfortably, and for a moment she's reminded that for an _undead _man of a hundred plus years, he oddly fits with her. She runs her fingers through his raven hair, drags them down his neck and across his bare shoulders. Muscle, flexing; firm, hard, _powerful_. She's never been attracted to the powerful men, not really. There was unassuming Clark and goofy Jimmy, and before them a string of high school boys that were just that, _boys_.

Damon is no boy; nor is he unassuming. He's lithe and keen and he sees everything in a glance. He found her one day outside of a coffee shop and he'd stared at her a moment too long, commented on her unusual attention to coffee. "A habit, even an addiction," she'd called it. "I have one of those," he'd replied, staring at her neck in a way she'd thought then was unusually erotic. He didn't want to kiss her pulse, though, he wanted to suck the blood from her until it stopped. But something had changed his mind along the way. Or, perhaps more believable, he felt like playing with his food. And ever the unlucky fool in love, Chloe Sullivan was suckered into being just that.

He had a way about him that intoxicated her. Not in the way she'd seen him do to other woman, entrancing them so fully they were drunk on him. She's fairly sure she's got her senses and that makes it worse. Because her instincts should encourage her to get away but all she does is lean in to him. He likes her. If he could, she thinks he might even love her. But there's no happily ever after here. An _afterlife,_ in her case, maybe. But Damon was no Prince Charming. If anything, he was the dark knight out to slay her for fun.

Soon. Maybe tomorrow. There's a hitch in her heart at the thought. Not of death, oddly enough. But that she might never feel this again, might never have his weight atop her, his lips kiss hers. He feels it, his eyes dart up, catch hers, and he looks amused. Instead of calling her out, he buries his face in her shoulder, his soft hair brushing her cheek. He nibbles her neck, tongue lashing. He's never broken her skin, not once, but he sucks hard, drawing bruises to the surface, as if he can't help but _want _her blood, even if he never tastes it. It's against his nature, she knows. What he wants is to tear her jugular open and wring every warm drop onto his tongue. But he doesn't. And she wonders if he's not dancing on that same perilous edge between life and death. Except it's _hers _between his fingers, his _fangs_.

Tonight, he doesn't drink from her, doesn't kill her. Instead he takes refuge in her body, he makes her scream and cry and shudder in absolute ecstasy, the kind that makes her toes curl and her eyes roll into the back of her head. Her thighs hum, ache from the intense rocking of his body between them, and she wonders… Tomorrow night, when he comes to her, will he drink from her? Will he kill her?

She doesn't know.

What she does know is she will dance… and if she finally slips over the edge, so be it. The ride was more than worth it.


End file.
